Robert Lee Carter

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Robert Lee Carter, (born March 11, 1917, Caryville, Fla.—died Jan. 3, 2012, New York, N.Y.), American civil rights lawyer and judge who worked from 1944 as a member of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, fighting racial discrimination in education and housing—in particular, doing work to develop the legal theory that was used to support the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately outlawed separate public schools for black and white students. Carter earned degrees from Lincoln University in southeastern Pennsylvania (1937), Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. (1940), and Columbia University in New York City (1941). After service in the U.S. Army Air Force in World War II, he joined the Legal Defense and Education Fund, headed by Thurgood Marshall (later a Supreme Court justice), and soon became assistant special counsel. He was general counsel of the NAACP in 1956–68. Carter argued or coargued 22 cases before the Supreme Court, 21 of them successfully. He was appointed a U.S. district court judge for the southern district of New York in 1962, and in that capacity he ruled on, among other things, disputes that preceded the 1976 merger of the National Basketball Association and the American Basketball Association.

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